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Mi3 Audio Edition

Mi3 Audio Edition

A weekly wrap of the “must-know” developments in Marketing, Media, Agency and Technology for leaders and emerging leaders in the industry. Veteran industry journalist and Mi3 Executive Editor Paul McIntyre talks each week with guest marketers who are in the know on what matters at the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and technology. Powered mostly by Human Intelligence (HI).

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58 min
6 Jun

The CMO Awards Podcast Ep6: Best Growth Initiative of the Year in focus: CMOs of Arnott’s Group, Flintfox share how they unlocked growth opportunities in the very different worlds of B2C and B2C

This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams. In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Dill, CMO of inaugural award winner, Arnott’s Group, with Cath Brands, CMO of highly commended Flintfox International, plus inaugural judge Ty Hayes, former Curtin Uni CMO and founder of Growth Generators, to delve into what it takes to unlock growth that delivers business-grade impact. From first identifying the opportunity, to how they freed up capacity and gained cross-functional buy-in to make it happen, these marketing leaders from very different B2C and B2B worlds shed light on the programs of work that led to success – and importantly, where they had to rethink and pivot. For judges, Arnott’s Gluten Free was a clear winner for Best Growth Initiative of the Year award for its gluten free effort – the most incremental launch the FMCG has had to date. Today, gluten-free biscuits make up approximately 10 per cent of the total biscuit market, with an impressive annual growth rate of 40 per cent. Remarkably, Arnott’s has driven 82 per cent of this growth in the past year alone, chalking up $40 million in sales. “When we got into it, what people really wanted was our biggest, known, loved icons, but gluten-free versions with no taste trade off. So that pretty quickly set our true north,” says Jenni Dill. “That meant a multi-year journey to invest in new bakeries, establish new ways of working, new methods of baking, new ways of going to market, new locations on shelf. It really was a concerted effort, but we also wanted to make sure we weren't waiting two or three years to do something. So we had to get an MVP in the market. We had to start with our simpler products that were easier to get taste equivalent matches to in a gluten-free version. And then everything we did from a marketing perspective, had to make sure that everything was as incremental as it could possibly be.” At Flintfox, meanwhile, the growth opportunity was to take an Australian-made pricing solutions offering into the German, Austrian and Swiss markets. “The team and I had two goes at this,” Cath Brands admits. “In the first attempt, we did it the lazy way – we put a translate button on the website, did some contextual translation of what we did and decided to buy some LinkedIn media. Turns out that that's not how you go to business in Germany. That's not how the Germans play the game.” Take two required an all-encompassing approach: Native product extension, translation and new integrations with SAP, identifying nuanced user and macro conditions, building a market presence from scratch and a go-to-market approach. The result was winning two really big customers in Germany last year worth millions. For Ty Hayes, however different this year’s winner and highly commended brands may be, each identified strategic, innovative, approaches to drive significant net new revenue. “That was either attacking a new category or creating a new category, or entering a new market,” he says. They also demonstrate what Hayes sees as the top three things every growth initiative of substance needs: “Insight, foresight and experimentation”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The CMO Awards Podcast Ep6: Best Growth Initiative of the Year in focus: CMOs of Arnott’s Group, Flintfox share how they unlocked growth opportunities in the very different worlds of B2C and B2C
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42 min
5 Jun

Blending Sharp and Ritson: Distinctive differentiation and custom media moves needle for CommBank, Subway, NRMA Insurance as News Australia shifts approach.

Byron Sharp is a distinctive assets maximalist, suggesting how brands look and are recognised and embedded into people’s minds is more important than focusing on what they do differently to rival brands. Mark Ritson argues brands need differentiation to stand out from rivals and pull customers in. News Australia says you need both to drive growth – and that custom-made media that delivers engagement beyond reach is a critical multiplier.News Australia has just wrapped up its nationwide agency engagement roadshow, Frontiers, diving deep with hundreds of agency execs across dozens of workshops to unpack how to cut through and deliver much sharper results amid a comms sea of sameness. The key is moving beyond old-school approaches of tonnage-based reach and the legacy constructs of ‘paid, owned and earned’ media. Case studies for CommBank, NRMA Insurance, Subway and Toblerone strongly suggest the approach is working: Subway notched 3 per cent sales gains; NRMA Insurance and News Australia’s positive influence helped secure $7.2bn in government funding to fix Queensland’s Bruce Highway. Unsurprisingly, more Queenslanders now like NRMA Insurance than before.Now News Australia wants to work with agencies and brands to build better campaigns and more case studies. But that requires a shift in approach to planning and content creation. It’s harder work, says GM of Client Growth & Experience, Renee Sycamore, but powerful results prove “the effort definitely pays off”. The key to achieving “distinctively different” campaigns says Head of Growth Intelligence, Leigh Lavery, is to focus on three critical elements: Making content magnetic (i.e. it gets attention); momentous (i.e. contextually relevant, capturing the zeitgeist) and meaningful (i.e. saying and doing something that adds value to customers). But going against conventional wisdom on mass reach may also be required. As National Head of Digital Strategy and Streaming Dianna Molinaro puts it: “Everyone’s got reach … but what our agency partners and marketers really care about is the impact.” Likewise, everyone has data: “It’s about what we do with it.” Now News Australia is powering custom-made media with behavioural audience signals across the network to connect intent and content. Molinaro says data-driven relevance is where the growth gold lies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blending Sharp and Ritson: Distinctive differentiation and custom media moves needle for CommBank, Subway, NRMA Insurance as News Australia shifts approach.
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30 min
29 May

Omnichannel planning cuts ad fatigue, builds brand, speeds sales: New research shows how; Nunn Media cuts acquisition cost 24%

Marketing budgets are declining just as paid media costs are rising – meaning brands get less for every dollar spent, and fewer dollars to start with. But latest research commissioned by The Trade Desk into omnichannel versus multichannel media planning could provide sweet relief. In short, the difference between omnichannel and multichannel planning is that omnichannel campaigns are connected by data and technology from the get-go, whereas multichannel campaigns put ads into different channels one by one. The distinction is subtle – but the disparity in results can be massive. Across UK, US and Australian markets, the research found omnichannel ad campaigns outperform multichannel campaigns on nearly every metric by up to 90 per cent, delivering steep upside for marketing teams in improving the ROI performance of their paid media schedules. It also found that properly linking campaigns across channels significantly reduces the mental load on consumers, and therefore ad fatigue, and drives more conversions, faster. Versus “disconnected” multichannel campaigns, omnichannel campaigns were “one and a half times more persuasive, 50 per cent better at building emotional connection with audiences and 70 per cent better at encoding messages in long-term memory”, according to The Trade Desk Director of Marketing Research and Insights, Sara Picazo. Brands switching to omnichannel approaches also report massive performance gains: Picazo said working with The Trade Desk, IKEA boosted conversions by 339 per cent and cut time to conversion by 10 per cent.Likewise, Nunn Media Head of Digital and Data Lee Foster said brands taking an omnichannel approach are making lasting reductions in performance media costs – one client has cut cost per acquisition by 24 per cent, sustained over a nine-month period. Picazo and Foster urge brands not already harnessing omnichannel approaches to test the theory themselves. But the research also has implications for the way brand and agency planning teams are set up.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Omnichannel planning cuts ad fatigue, builds brand, speeds sales: New research shows how; Nunn Media cuts acquisition cost 24%
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1 hr, 3 min
26 May

The CMO Awards Podcast Ep5: Winners and finalists part 1: Why sticking it out for the long term is so important to the marketing chiefs at Intrepid, Kennard’s Hire and Patties Foods

While the numbers have been improving, CMOs still have the shortest tenure in the c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data shows CMOs in Fortune 500 companies now have average tenure of 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average tenure, while B2C record the longest. Across the inaugural Australian CMOs of the Year finalists and winners, a list including both c-suite level marketers as well as heads of marketing reporting into divisional or other c-suite leaders, average role tenure came in at a much lower 3 years 3 months.Yet across submissions, several marketing chiefs cited much longer role and company tenure – and delivered stronger marketing effectiveness case studies for it. Three joined us for the latest CMO Awards podcast, powered by Mi3, to reveal how longer tenure has helped them build trust and pursue bolder, more expansive decisions and work: Intrepid’s former chief customer officer and now president of the Americas, Leigh Barnes, Kennard’s Hire GM of marketing and customer, Manelle Merhi, and Patties Foods’ chief marketing and growth officer, Anand Surujpal. The trio agreed: Tenure has seen them flip the switch on marketing as an ego-centric profession focused on delivering individual results – often, as quickly as you can – to putting the brands and business first. All of them are investing in longer-term opportunities and have the confidence to experiment, fail fast, pick up the learnings and progress. As well as sharpening their commercial aptitude, tenure has also opened doors they never would have found the handle on without embedding themselves truly as leaders within their respective organisations. Barnes, who has been with Intrepid for nearly 15 years and took 14th spot in our CMOs of the Year, has spent the last three years orchestrating a transformation of marketing from 90:10 performance-to-brand mix, to 60:40 in favour of brand. It’s been a huge adjustment but results speak volumes: From a $60.7 million loss in 2021 to a $21.8 million net profit, and a $29 million revenue bump from first-time customers in early 2025 alone. “For me, tenure has enabled me to be real, and that gives me the opportunity to say what I think, say when I'm struggling, say when I don't understand something, be vulnerable. But also, when I'm really confident about something, I can say that with gusto, and the business backs and supports that,” Barnes comments. Merhi, who joined Kennards as head of marketing 12 years ago,  was 25th in our CMOs of the Year list for her bold work revitalising the sales team, as well as embedding four key customer personas that are driving growth, including its latest commercial segment successes. Today, every Kennard’s branch and employee speaks the language of customer, she says proudly. “I genuinely believe tenure allowed for the trust, for proven capability, for notches on the belt that make people want to sit, listen and be curious in return,” Merhi says.It’s that willingness to back you that’s also helping Surujpal, an eight-year veteran at Patties Foods, to take recently acquired brand, Lean Cuisine, in a completely different direction. He’s also tasked with taking Four ‘N’ Twenty into international markets.“It's the trust of the organisation that you've got this, you’ve done this before. You know you're going to get a few things wrong, but you're going to get more things right than wrong,” he says. “The relationship between myself, my sales counterparts, my CEO, my CFO, is really strong. We've got an incredibly strong business partner relationship.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The CMO Awards Podcast Ep5: Winners and finalists part 1: Why sticking it out for the long term is so important to the marketing chiefs at Intrepid, Kennard’s Hire and Patties Foods
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46 min
22 May

‘It’s all double duty’: A CMO, a CEO and an agency boss on brand v performance myths, the ‘mother metric’, and expensive mistakes to avoid

The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory. Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterprise – don't actually have a marketing strategy.” They just have “a plan and a budget”. He recommends reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – and stop treating brand and performance separately. “It's all performance and it's all brand,” per Healy. “Everything is double duty.” Equally, he urges marketers to focus on the metrics that matter: “What is driving business performance?” Tammy Barton, CEO and founder of MyBudget is the brand, literally. Along with its customers, Barton features in its ads. The one time she changed tack, at the suggestion of “one of Australia’s largest agencies”, it backfired. Results tanked and she had to pull the expensive series of TVCs. She put the old ads back on TV “and leads immediately that week went up 15 per cent”. She shot low cost new versions – still using real customers – “and leads went up another 40 per cent”, says Barton. “So you just do whatever works.” MyBudget’s marketing team looks at “hundreds of metrics”, she says. “But the ones that are really important to us are, what is it costing us per lead? What is it costing us per contract? What is it costing us per acquisition, including our sales expense? And we have to look at our lifetime value … versus what are we investing for that cost of acquisition, and what is that ratio? We track that every month.” Atomic 212° co-founder and Chief Digital Officer, James Dixon, thinks media agencies “have been guilty of metric vomit over the years”, spewing data and numbers at clients. Dixon suggests only one “mother metric” is required: MROI – which can stand for marketing return on investment, or, in the media agency context, media return on investment. To underline how media is delivering returns, Atomic 212° has been “doubling down on MMM” with clients, but focusing on media, rather than broader variables within market mix models. RAA’s Healy thinks Dixon “is onto something”, though, “I just don't think it's applicable in all circumstances”. Either way, he backs MyBudget’s Barton: “Just test everything. Whatever works, do that. And if it doesn’t work, get out of it, fast.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

‘It’s all double duty’: A CMO, a CEO and an agency boss on brand v performance myths, the ‘mother metric’, and expensive mistakes to avoid
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30 min
19 May

Kahneman subverted: Behavioural economics weaponised as dark patterns pump ecom, platform profits – prepare for legal change, warns Consumer Policy Research Centre

Lawmakers around the world are setting their sights on ‘dark patterns’, the way consumer choice is manipulated wholesale by companies for profit – either directly by upselling and herding them into higher yielding decisions, or locking them into services, or “data grabs” that can be monetised indirectly. Australia is next off the rank, and businesses should take action now, starting with UX design, according to Chandni Gupta, Deputy CEO of influential think tank the Consumer Policy Research Centre, who’s work underpins key planks of the ACCC’s regulatory overhauls and which holds sway in Canberra.Dark patterns are “entrenched” across the digital economy – with companies “reverse engineering” the “nudge” principles of Daniel Kahneman’s behavioural economics to serve profit rather than help people make better choices, says Gupta. Already, the likes of LinkedIn, Amazon, TikTok, Meta and Epic Games have run afoul of regulators, while ticketing platform StubHub has conducted experiments that show the double-digit profit impact of manipulating consumer choice via hidden costs. Gupta, back from a global tour or regulators, lawmakers and enforcement bodies, and armed with a fresh report on her findings, says the practice is so widespread across the digital economy that most young adults have probably never lived in a world where they are not being manipulated. AI risks “supercharging” the practice – and making dark patterns darker still.But Gupta warns businesses to prepare for regulation, enforcement and redress, with the Australian government committed to a ban on unfair business practices – and a strong overlap between dark patterns and the Privacy overhaul now gearing up for its second act.  She sees profit upside for those that overhaul UX design now “to put the person and their wellbeing at the centre” rather than “waiting to be caught”.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kahneman subverted: Behavioural economics weaponised as dark patterns pump ecom, platform profits – prepare for legal change, warns Consumer Policy Research Centre
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